Practicing Death & Dying workshop with Keith Hennessy - PDX

Dying and caring for the dead as creative, experimental, social practice. Healing, fake healing, playing dead, inventing ceremony. Dying alone and dying in community. Saying goodbye as transformative sculpture, performance, ritual, and play. The trip is divided into 3 practices: fake healing, solo death mediation, collaborative care of the dead. The final practice requires several volunteers (dying swans?) to play dead for 2 hours in service to community death practice.

Keith Hennessy is a performer, choreographer, teacher, writer and activist. Born in Sudbury Canada, he lives in San Francisco and tours internationally. His interdisciplinary research engages improvisation, ritual and public action as tools for investigating political realities. Ideas and practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, punk, and queer-feminism motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s creative and activist projects. Hennessy directs Circo Zero, and was a member of the collaborative performance companies: Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann, CORE, and Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard. Awards, commissions, residencies? Yes, several. Rejections, unemployment, failures? Yes, plenty.